Weapon Shop de Omasse is a quirky rhythm game with lots of jokes related to RPG culture. It is part of the Guild series of games, a compilation produced by Level-5 & various famous individuals, in this case, Yoshiyuki Hirai, were given a chance to design whatever they wanted. In Weapon Shop de Omasse, you play as Yuhan an apprentice blacksmith in a newly reopened weapon shop, unlike other shops this one has a twist, letting adventures rent weapons rather than buy them & only receiving payment upon a successful quest, no rent fee due if the weapon is broken or lost. Of course, it is up to you to make this rather odd business model successful.
Forging new weapons is where the rhythm aspect of the game comes into play in which it has you tap away at the slab of red hot metal to the beat of the music. Sounds simple enough but you must manage factors such as heat & how fast you beat the metal to get the most out of the finished product’s stats. When finished, your hard work will be tallied up into stats which will increase or decrease the base stats of the weapon. Polishing is another way to increase stats by a tiny amount, an even simpler ‘minigame’ consisting of just rubbing the armaments with the styli to bring out the shine to each side of the weapon. You can do this after forging the weapon & after receiving it back from a successful rent.
Renting out your weapons is where you will meet the diverse cast of named characters, ranging from an overenthusiastic knight to a down on his luck samurai to even generic NPCs. It is these quests that propel the story along & it is your job to match the weapon to the character & their journey. Each has a preferred weapon & you must provide them the ones they are efficient with to help them succeed. Success brings about money & items used in forging while a failing equates to a lost weapon, time & you must repeat that quest again. While you are stuck in your shop & the others are out & about, you can use the ‘Grindcast,’ a sort of real-time Twitter-like thing, to check up on each character. This is where you will get pieces of the story along with whatever else the “heroes” have to say at the beginning & end of their adventure.
That just about sums up the game. You forge weapons, send them out with would be heroes, get snippets of story, rinse & repeat. The game is repetitive; there is no denying that. There is little to do overall, outside of finishing the weapon collection & the post-game stuff which is more of the same but with higher stat requirements. The story takes a fair while to get to the meat of it & early on it presented the Main Foe, but it never felt as a threat just an end-point for each characters’ individual but somehow connected stories. Music is not that great & you will hear the same music as the rest of the game for the forging section, so eventually one might just turn off the volume altogether. Overall, this title is not mechanically bad & the comedy is certainly funny, but it is not for people without patience. If you have a few dollars to spare, about 8-10+ hours to spend & a lot of patience, then Weapon Shop de Omasse is not all that terrible, there are certainly worst games out there for much more.
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